September
First up, September sees Andrew Westgarth, the principle organiser of DDD North and the co-founder of the NEBytes user group, visit Edinburgh to talk about IIS 8. Andrew’s a great speaker and is very knowledgeable on this subject. If you need to learn more about Microsoft’s IIS web server, this is the event for you!

Later in October, Chris Canal, waxes lyrical about Single Page Web Applications – are they the next big thing? Come along on the 9th of October and find out from Chris! Given that this Manning book is still on the Manning Early Access Programme, I’m very keen to hear what Chris has to say! Chris is a great speaker to boot!

November
Lastly, November sees the return of the “mini DDD” that is DunDDD…being held in Dundee, oddly enough. The call for speakers is open and will remain open until early November. If you’d like to register to attend DunDDD, registration will open on Monday 24th September.

With the rise of smarter browser, single page applications are becoming more popular. In this session we will look at creating a full client side application with and without backbone.js, and use Simple.Web to run the server-side part of the application.

Simple.Web
A lightweight, object-oriented (Model-View-Handler) framework for modern web development in .NET

Simple.Web Design Goals

Keep it simple;

It should be ridiculously easy to do TDD and/or BDD;

Support asynchronous, non-blocking handling of requests;

Make it easy to build a proper RESTful, hypermedia-driven application and services, including supporting content-type negotiation for all requests, including HTML;

Be really open and extensible, because if people can write plug-ins and add-ons easily, I don’t have to build all that stuff in.

Backbone.js
Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface.

About the speaker
Chris has worked at a Web Developer for the past 7 years. Starting with procedural languages like ASP and PHP, he quickly moved onto the .NET Platform when first released. A great believer is continual–improvement, Chris is constantly looking for new technologies, tools and methodologies that will help in creating robust and maintainable software applications.

Chris currently works at StormId as a Senior Developer and Mentor, as well as trying to keep his manager from doing something crazy.

Scottish Developers are very pleased to announce that Microsoft’s General Manager for the Visual Studio leadership team will be delivering a presentation at Microsoft’s Edinburgh office on the 1st of October!

This is a special event that celebrates the launch of Visual Studio 2012.

To compliment the launch of Visual Studio 2012 on the 12th September we are running a series of RoadShow events and dropping in on 4 cities in 5 days. We’d love for you to come and join us at some of these events. We will be joined by Shanku Niyogi who’s team have been instrumental in the creation of the product and he will own the testing elements of Visual Studio moving forward.

At each location we will be joined by some of our strategic partners (BlackMarble and SQS) who will bring some “real world” experience by talking about new areas of the products and how they are applying the tools.

This post relates to the afternoon sessions running from 1300 through to 1700. Shanku is also presenting at the community launch in the early evening at the same location, where there will be beer, pizza and swag!

About the speakerShanku Niyogi leads the team responsible for testing the next generation of Microsoft’s developer tools, including the Visual Studio product line and the .NET Framework. Most recently, as Director of Program Management, Shanku led the design team for Visual Studio Pro and Express, developer tools for platforms such as Windows, Office, and Azure, and managed and JavaScript programming languages.

Shanku joined the Visual Studio leadership team as GM in 2008, and delivered the first set of Visual Studio tools for Azure, and the Chakra Javascript runtime in Internet Explorer. Previously, Shanku had been a part of the .NET Developer Platform organization for nearly seven years, where he helped ship several version of ASP.NET, and helped incubate technologies such as ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, WCF RIA Services for Silverlight, and ASP.NET Mobile Controls. Shanku has been with Microsoft since 2008. Shanku holds a Bachelor of Mathematics degree in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.

Scottish Developers are very pleased to announce that Microsoft’s General Manager for the Visual Studio leadership team will be delivering a presentation at Microsoft’s Edinburgh office during the evening of the 1st of October!

This is a special event that celebrates the launch of Visual Studio 2012 – it is an evening session that follows on from the afternoon sessions.

About the speakerShanku Niyogi leads the team responsible for testing the next generation of Microsoft’s developer tools, including the Visual Studio product line and the .NET Framework. Most recently, as Director of Program Management, Shanku led the design team for Visual Studio Pro and Express, developer tools for platforms such as Windows, Office, and Azure, and managed and JavaScript programming languages.

Shanku joined the Visual Studio leadership team as GM in 2008, and delivered the first set of Visual Studio tools for Azure, and the Chakra Javascript runtime in Internet Explorer. Previously, Shanku had been a part of the .NET Developer Platform organization for nearly seven years, where he helped ship several version of ASP.NET, and helped incubate technologies such as ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, WCF RIA Services for Silverlight, and ASP.NET Mobile Controls. Shanku has been with Microsoft since 2008. Shanku holds a Bachelor of Mathematics degree in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.

With the release of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, Internet Information Server (IIS) received a major update and this has continued through IIS 7.5 which was released with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

Now we sit on the verge of another update with the upcoming release of Windows Server 8 and Windows 8 which bring with them IIS 8.0.

In this session we’ll set the scene with a quick run through of the building blocks put in place through IIS 7 and 7.5 and then deep dive into the features coming in IIS 8.0 which enable Developers and IT pros to deliver optimised, advanced interactive applications using technologies such as HTML5 and Web Sockets whilst also making use of scalability and configuration enhancements on the underlying platform.

About the speakerAndrew Westgarth is Co-founder of North East Bytes (@nebytes), a free User Group covering the North East and Cumbrian regions of the United Kingdom having technical meetings covering Development and IT Pro topics every month and he is the principal organiser of DDD North (@dddnorth), a free community conference held once a year in the North of England.

He is a Technical Architect at Sage (UK) Ltd working on large scale web applications. Andrew is very active in the UK Developer Community, attending and speaking at multiple events, supporting users and other User Groups.

In the past he has spoken at the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference, VBUG’s National Two Day Conference; DDD Events and local User Group meetings. Andrew has experience in VB6/.NET; C#; ASP.NET and Internet Information Services.

I am pleased to announce that a Windows Phone version of the DDD 10 agenda as just cleared certification. It’s likely to be available during Wednesday 29th August. [Update: it’s here]

I have submitted an update to take into account changes that were made to the agenda over the last few days; hopefully that app update will make it through in time for the event itself!

I know I said it last year, but I do hope to add some features to the next version that will make it pull updates down from a web-site, thus removing the need for agenda updates to require a rebuild and re-submission to the Marketplace. With any luck, the DDD North agenda app will be the first to enjoy some updates.

These dev camps are great opportunities for you to spend a day with like-minded individuals and the talented evangelists from Microsoft. If you are looking to build apps for the soon-to-be-released Windows 8 operating system (and indeed, Windows Phone), attending a dev camps is the perfect way to kick-start your development!

Programming Metro-style Apps Workshops are a unique event in the UK designed to help developers get started on the road to building software for Windows 8 and Windows RT. We take you from the point of having done “Hello, world” and the basics and lift you up to the next level where you can start building real retail and line-of-business apps on the platform.

You’ll learn:

How and why Windows was “reimagined”

The fundamentals of moving from .NET

Asynchronous programming

Sandboxing and protection

Unit testing

Working with SQLite

Sharing, search, notifications

Application lifetime and background activities

Packaging, private deployment, and store deployment

…and more

We guarantee by the end of the session you’ll have a firm understanding of Metro-style development on Windows 8 and Windows RT.

Calling all Scottish Developers!
Microsoft will be bringing Windows 8 to Edinburgh on May 1st – join the UK team for a day of developer-level, demo-driven sessions and see first-hand the opportunities for designing, developing and selling apps world-wide via the Windows Store.

Windows 8 offers unparalleled new opportunities for application developers to build and sell apps world-wide via the Windows Store. In this event, we’ll deliver developer-level, demo-driven sessions that give you an accelerated entry into what it means to design, develop and publish exciting, modern, polished, world-ready applications for next-generation devices running Windows 8.

Level of knowledge required:

1. A familiarity with .NET development and Visual Studio would be advantageous but not required.
2. We will talk about building Windows 8 applications with JavaScript and with .NET with an emphasis on the .NET technologies.